The horrific factory fire at a Karachi garments and clothing enterprise where 289 workers — men, women and children — perished and hundreds were injured with severe burn wounds in an inferno in a caged factory with sealed gates is not an exception but the norm for the proletariat in Pakistan. It lays bare the conditions in which they are forced to work. On the same day in another shoe factory in Lahore more than 25 workers were burnt to death and scores maimed. The one reason that the media had to highlight this tragedy was the enormity of the calamity and the very large number of the victims in just one incident. In Lahore alone, there are 8,000 factories that are vulnerable to such catastrophes. There are thousands more in Karachi and other cities of Pakistan that are susceptible to such a fate. The plight of the workers was described by one of the survivors of the Lahore factory fire who said, “Everyone has to die one day. People like me will die of starvation if they don’t work.” There is now a deafening din, a hue and cry in the media by the political elite, business tycoons, the honchos of the state and the apologists of capitalism in the intelligentsia. Torrents of crocodile tears flow from the representatives of the system who have amassed obscene amounts of wealth and live in hedonistic luxury. If one compares their lives to the conditions of ordinary workers in Pakistan, it would seem they are from another planet. The analysts of the corporate media are churning out diverse theories about the causes of this gruesome disaster and playing the blame game where everybody and every department is liable except for the real perpetrator of this devastation — rotten Pakistani capitalism itself. The masses are being coaxed to prevent them from identifying their real tormentors. This harrowing episode poses the real question. Can the capitalists sustain the fabulous rates of profit they are extracting from the workers and at the same time grant living wages, pensions, health benefits, proper safety conditions such as fire-proofing the shop floors, building a modern infrastructure for industrial production and decent conditions of work? The answer is a big no! The historically belated Pakistani ruling class after ‘independence’ faced a world market already dominated by the imperialist powers that imposed an economic and technological stranglehold. Their state never had the capacity to build a modern infrastructure or carry out the tasks of the industrial revolution. Therefore, to attain their rates of profit they had to exploit labour to the nth degree. But even that was not enough; they had to steal resources, evade taxes and plunder the state to fulfil their insatiable lust for money. The state in return became a beneficiary of all this extortion and involved itself in business. It is not an accident that a subsidiary of the Pakistan army is the largest entrepreneur with an investment of $ 27 billion in the economy, and this is just in the formal economy that is only about one-third of Pakistan’s total real economy. Even the lowest tiers of the state indulged in this orgy of bribery and corruption. Hence, to blame the inspectors of industrial safety, the police and other departments of negligence in reality is a cynical farce to absolve the top criminal elite and a whole system based on corruption. The fact is that these lower ranking state officials could not survive if they tried to be ‘honest’. The method of blaming individuals is used to conceal the bigger picture. Concentrating on a single tree hides the forest. Inquiries, commissions of investigation, judicial probes and similar deceptive tactics have a long history in this country. It is a common perception among the masses that to delay, diffuse and divert a burning issue or a monumental event these are the most abused tools of almost every regime in Pakistan. If a problem has to be buried and pushed into oblivion, judicial commissions are set up whose results are never published. The deaths of the workers in the Karachi and Lahore factories are being subjected to a similar fate. Then, after all the crocodile tears, it will be business as usual. More workers and peasants will be killed in factory fires, industrial accidents, state terrorism and other brutalities. New commissions, using obscure language, will be set up at state expense. Then time will be allowed to lapse for the issue to lose its intensity. The vicious cycle of capitalist drudgery will continue extracting huge profits from the blood and bones of the toiling masses and more such atrocities will be repeated in the future. The ruling class and their petit bourgeois cronies of the so-called civil society are calling for vigils, days of mourning and have offered televised condolences. One of the allegedly corrupt tycoons has offered compensation to the bereaved families. First, it will provoke family feuds for the division of the paltry crumbs thrown to them and, secondly, hardly anything will actually go beyond the corrupt bureaucratic apparatus and reach the families of the victims. Most likely, it is a media gesture that will not even materialise. Another prognosis of foreign involvement or a terrorist attack has been put forward by the interior minister. What a convenient theory! Media, business magnates and the elite politicians are going hoarse describing this calamity as a ‘national tragedy’. Those destitute workers that perished belonged to a class enslaved, coerced, deprived and exploited by the ruling classes in the name of the ‘nation’. The oppression of the national groups, discrimination against women, the abhorrent treatment meted out to religious minorities, and the bloodletting going on between the Shias, Wahabis, Sunnis, and other fundamentalist sects craving to cut the throats of rival Islamic sects, hardly makes this a viable nation. However, the decisive conflict is between the classes, between the rich and the poor. This is a tragedy of a working class, not a nation that is represented by this reactionary class of vultures. These toiling masses have suffered relentless repression and have suffered the calamities of capitalism through national chauvinism, religious bigotry and a false patriotism indoctrinated into the mass psychology by media and the state. The masses broke these chains in 1968-69. Their struggle is not a national struggle but a class war. The phoenix of the proletariat shall rise from the ashes with a vengeance. Victory will be its destiny. The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and International Secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at ptudc@hotmail.com